Fly grazing.

The photo above shows the traveller pony that has been resident on the small parcel of land that occupies the area between the end of James Watt Way and the Thames riverside pathway behind Morrison’s in Erith. One or more ponies have been kept on this piece of land for a number of years now. The owner of the land seems to be happy with the arrangement, and no laws have been broken. That is, until recently. Over the last two weeks the pony has escaped from the enclosure twice, causing a Police incident in both instances. On the most recent occasion it ran up Appold Street and had to be headed off before it got into the very busy Manor Road, with fast moving heavy vehicles and regular double decker 99 buses. The problem seems to be that the fence surrounding part of the pony’s enclosure is in a very poor state of repair, and it has been relatively easy for the animal to escape. The police are eager to speak to the owners of the pony, but as far as I am aware, they are having trouble locating or contacting them. The practice of “fly-grazing” has become increasingly common both in the local area, and also around the country. Thousands of horses and ponies are being abandoned by their erstwhile owners as irresponsible breeding, spiralling bills and sale prices which have reached rock bottom take their toll. A pony can fetch as little as £5 at auction – if it sells at all, whilst stable costs, feed and vets bills can amount to around £100 per week per animal. The six main horse welfare charities have come together to compile a report on the situation; it would also appear that the European appetite for horse meat may be fuelling the situation – a £5 pony can turn into a £230 carcass on the European meat market. It may be that ponies are actually being farmed for live export to France, Belgium and Italy. The RSPCA have called for legislation that will enable them to more quickly identify owners and punish them with fines and the seizure of animals for fly-grazing. They also want a review of agreements allowing the free movement of horses not intended for slaughter between Britain, Ireland and France. The British horse population is thought to be just under one million animals in size. The vast majority are owned privately for leisure – a sector which, unlike the horse racing industry, is not tightly regulated. I know that whenever travellers put one or more ponies on the waste land, the ponies become an attraction for parents and childminders looking after small children – the animals end up getting fat, as they have a seemingly non ending series of treats given to them by their small visitors.

Back in 1939, Burton’s opened a bespoke tailors shop at 82 - 84 Erith High Street, where you could get a custom made suit for 45 shillings (£2.50 equivalent). Local Historian Ken Chamberlain has memories of the place being extremely impressive, and sent me the advert a while back, with the very dashing looking chap in the photo above - click on the image for a larger view. I notice that the sharp styling is heavily influenced by American fashions of the time – wide shoulders and a narrow waist – a look that featured in many period gangster movies which were very popular then. Montague Burton was the head of what became the biggest bespoke tailoring business in the world. He was born Meshe David Osinky in the pogrom-ravaged Russian province of Kovno (now part of Lithuania) in 1885, to turn up alone in Yorkshire with only a few words of English at the age of 15. In Tsarist Russia, where Jews had been largely confined to the zone known as the Pale of Settlement and restricted there to making a hard living from trades such as tailoring, cobbling and cabinet making. Of the 150,000 to 200,000 Jews who fled to Britain between 1881 and 1914, many simply transferred their skills to the sweatshops of London; others, however, settled near the Yorkshire wool industry, where a Methodist tailor, Joseph Hepworth, had begun to sell his wares directly from his Leeds factory to the public through a chain of ready-made clothes shops. Osinky/Burton wasn’t the only trader to take the idea an important stage further by adding a bespoke alternative to the suit on the hanger. Nor was he the cheapest; by the 1920s plenty of tailors were offering suits priced in shillings – “the 30-bob suit” – and not guineas. But no rival had his dedication to organisation, salesmanship and publicity. He transformed the look of the nation. In 1960, the peak year of Burton's output, the company turned out 1,739,397 made-to-measure garments that, when jackets and trousers were put together, and omitting a few waistcoats from the picture, became roughly equivalent to 850,000 men’s suits. In terms of employment, it was among Britain’s six biggest companies. No other business in the world had a bigger chain of textile shops – Burton’s had around 600 – and few shops of any kind were as distinct in their appearance. Ranked by facades that descended in importance from Portland stone through polished granite to white terracotta, they stood out among the jumbled Victorian architecture of industrial Britain like beacons of modernity. Many are now listed buildings. One or two still house the billiard halls that the teetotal Montague Burton liked to house above his shops, in the belief that they kept young men from drinking. Burton was knighted in 1933, and his empire survived for another two or three decades after his death in 1952 and then, after diversifications into women’s wear and the merciless assault of jeans, it began to crumble. Today, the Topman chain is the Burton family’s last significant legacy in retail.

You may have seen a few mentions in the business press recently of rumours that the Daily Mail is in talks to buy veteran Internet company Yahoo! I was intrigued by this, and have been doing some digging. The potential link up between the mid-market tabloid newspaper and the former search and web content giant does not seem an obvious one. The Daily Mail wants to break into the North American market, and needs a means of doing so, though one analyst has likened the potential purchase of Yahoo! To the tying of two bricks together to see if they will now help each other float. Having said that, in the context of the UK, the Mail does better than all the other newspapers, at this, but not as well as Yahoo – so it is no rescue. This is more a case of buying Yahoo to get a foot in the US and some help with online content, when in fact Yahoo in the US is considered weak in these respects. It is a shadow of its former self – back in the early days of the World Wide Web, the Yahoo! Search engine and content portal was a world leader. The smart money is that Yahoo! Will not exist in name form by the end of this year, but instead will be subsumed into either the Daily Mail, or another media organisation. If this does happen, it is quite likely that Yahoo! Mail and Flickr may be sold off to a third party, which might cause worry for long – time users of those services.

In a related story, web researchers have been investigating some statistics regarding the average memory size of modern web pages; their results are astonishing. The average web page is now roughly the same size as the full install image for the pioneering first person shoot - em - up DOS game Doom from back in 1993, which weighed in at roughly 2.3Mb. Most of the web page bloat is due to images, which take up on average 1,463KB of data. Next is script code, which occupies 360KB, followed by video, averaging 200KB per page. If you are familiar with the classic video game Doom, you may recall that Doom is a multi-level first person shooter that ships with an advanced 3D rendering engine and multiple levels, each comprised of maps, sprites and sound effects. By comparison, 2016's web struggles to deliver a page of web content in the same size. If that doesn't give you pause for thought, then you are missing something. I suppose that one also needs to factor in that we are no longer living in a world of PCs with 4MB of RAM, 33MHz processors, text-only bulletin boards, and 33 kbps modems – everything is scaled up, including the complexity and size of internet downloads. The world has moved on, and technology with it. More information has been created and stored in the last twenty years than in the whole of human history before it. Information technology has changed the world far more than we are really aware of.

Pewty Acres is currently undergoing a substantial refit; the front bedroom is currently in the process of being gutted; I had a manky old white melamine wardrobe which has been slowly disintegrating over the last few years. It has now been dismantled (though “demolished” would be a more accurate description). The bedroom is now going to be repainted, a new fitted wardrobe installed, along with a new bed and mattress. I have managed to source all of the labour and bedroom goods from independent local companies at little more cost had I gone to one of the large chain stores usually located on retail parks and that advertise heavily on TV. On top of this, the quality of the mass produced stuff (usually made in Chinese sweatshops) is not a patch on the local stuff, and you get a far superior level of customer service. I have a policy of always using local independent suppliers whenever possible. It does not usually mean more expense, and it keeps the money in the local economy rather than going to some faceless private equity company or investment bank.

House prices are increasing all round London and the South East. I do get to wonder how much longer that they can continue to spiral upwards. The housing charity Shelter has been carrying out research on the subject; it found that house prices in Greater London are currently rising at a rate fifteen times greater than wage rises. Normally this would be called a housing bubble, and it would burst fairly quickly as property became unaffordable and the market stabilised itself. This looks unlikely in the present environment, as much of the property purchasing being undertaken is not by local people, but by foreign investors. London is a great place for foreign investors to stash their cash in the form of real estate. Whatever else we may be, the country is stable, has the rule of law, and a rock solid banking system. Wealthy people can invest in the certain knowledge that their cash will not go missing courtesy of a bent banker, or a despotic politician. In a way this has made the situation for local people worse. Money is flowing out of restrictive regimes such as China and Russia and into UK banks via property developers. It may be good for the balance of payments of the country, but it is terrible news for the average person trying to get on the property ladder. Because the money is mainly coming from abroad, the housing bubble is far less likely to burst in the near future. Property is being purchased by wealthy foreign investors in an effort to get their money out of their own country and converted into a resource which they deem likely to be a better investment than stocks and shares, and is a lot less heavily regulated. The imminent arrival of Crossrail and the opening of the Paramount London theme park will only make this situation worse for any local person looking to buy a property to live in. The number of high – end houses and flats that have been bought by vacant owners and left standing empty as an investment is huge. It does nothing to alleviate the housing crisis and in reality causes heartache for many.

Several of the tabloid newspapers got themselves very worked up earlier in the week with something that to be honest in my opinion they made out of pretty much nothing, in what appears to be a classic case of "never let the facts get in the way of a good story". On Tuesday the Daily Star published a story about how a UFO had been spotted on a live video feed from the International Space Station, and that when NASA official realised, they cut the video feed to the public.  The Star wrote "Shocking footage – broadcast live by NASA – shows a blurry, apparently diamond-shaped object near the space station in orbit above Earth. But as the object appears to be coming closer and into focus the live feed is cut. The bombshell video has sent conspiracy theorists and UFO hunters into meltdown. Though far off, the object looks huge and appears to be flying high over the rotating Earth below. It seems to be getting larger and larger as the video continues – until the screen suddenly turns blue. When the feed restarts it is of a different angle, showing the space station – where British astronaut Tim Peake is right now. But if the change of shot was supposed to hush up the “alien spacecraft” it failed – as the object is still visible in the background". So NASA are part of a global conspiracy and cover up? - NASA has enough money to pay someone to watch the feed, their hand hovering over a giant "SHUT IT ALL DOWN" button. They don't. NASA knows they might have something to hide, so DOESN'T delay the live stream by one minute in case "Hey, aliens wandered into the frame, let's just static out those seconds and go oops, technical difficulties". The aliens are intelligent enough to travel between worlds but aren't smart enough to hide from a camera that NASA could have told them, in advance, that they were pointing in this one place - after all space is very big. None of the other observation devices pointed randomly at the sky (including people observing the ISS through their amateur telescopes and remote cameras, as people are want to do) saw this. The EU, Russians, Chinese and Indians with all their hardware and observation technology (none of whom save possibly the EU have any incentive to cooperate with the US and would, in fact, leap at the chance to discredit and shame them) didn't see it either. The "UFO" is almost certainly an internal reflection on the porthole that the camera was looking through. The "object is blurry, and would appear to be outside of the camera's depth of field setting, which seems to be set at infinity, as the Earth is in good focus. Logically that would mean that the object was small, and very close to the camera. Either way it is extremely unlikely to be anything of any consequence. Also the "NASA cut - off" was nothing of the sort. The International Space Station uses a series of communication satellites to beam its transmissions back to Earth, every few minutes it "hands over" from one satellite to another as the ISS orbits the Earth - in the same way as a mobile phone switches between cells as it moves around. This causes the signal from the ISS to drop for a couple of seconds, it is certainly not anything in any way suspicious. It merely shows an example of ill - informed and poorly researched journalism. Still, the Daily Mail not long ago featured a "story" about a "ghost child" climbing on a parked car outside of someone's house. The "chilling video" which was shown was taken from the house owners CCTV system. What it actually showed was a spider weaving a web over the camera lens. As anyone who has a domestic CCTV system will know, spiders are attracted to the infra red LED lights that typical CCTV cameras use at night. Nothing supernatural, just a straightforward spider looking for a home. As I mentioned earlier, certain newspapers don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Erith Fun Day is set for a new venue this year. For the last couple of years the well - supported local event has been held in Erith Riverside Gardens, but this year it is moving to the recreation ground at Erith Sports Centre. I understand the reason for this is they expect a larger number of stall holders, and the ground offers a larger amount of space. I am in two minds about this - the new venue will be closer to the large number of residents of the Erith Park development, which is virtually next door, but it is a less central venue that the much loved Erith Riverside Gardens. I think we will just have to wait and see how it turns out. I always look forward to the Fun Day. It is taking place on Saturday the 9th of July. You can see further details by clicking here. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below, or by Emailing hugh.neal@gmail.com.

I have read quite widely that Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife are quite partial to a curry. It has been reported in the press that the prime minister even pledged to protect the struggling £4.2bn curry industry, which employs 100,000 people, at the British Curry awards in 2013. He said he would “get the skilled Asian chefs you need” to the UK, while the home secretary, Theresa May, has admitted that curry chefs are a shortage occupation. This shortage has been caused by increasingly tough immigration rules, so that restaurants are unable to hire the skilled chefs they need. This makes it difficult for these businesses to grow, while restaurants are unable to provide adequate customer service levels or fulfil orders. If the problem was acute when Cameron made that pledge, it is now a full-blown crisis. Around six hundred curry restaurants have closed in the past eighteen months, while there are fears that a further four thousand – about a third of the industry – could shut. Current immigration rules stipulate that a chef from outside the UK must be paid £29,570, after deductions for accommodation and meals, which is too expensive for most curry restaurants. Moreover, the jobs cannot be in a restaurant with a takeaway service, which most curry houses rely upon. Several schemes have been set up to teach people unfamiliar with Indian food how to cook and serve it in a restaurant setting; it would seem that these schemes have not been as successful as had been anticipated. Personally I think the problem is somewhat more complex and nuanced than is currently being reported. I cannot believe that restaurants need to recruit from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As the older head chefs retire, why are the existing junior chefs not being promoted? On top of this, there are many British people of UK origin who can cook excellent British Indian Restaurant style curries - you only have to take a look at the number of YouTube videos showing how to cook various recipes. One excellent example is the very popular series - "Al's Kitchen" - Al shows how to cook all sorts of very authentic restaurant style curries, and I believe he's never been anywhere near the Indian subcontinent. I cannot see the need for importing chefs from abroad - there are many UK based chefs who could do the job just as well. I think the real reason the restaurants have to import chefs is that working in a restaurant kitchen is not the job of choice for many - the first generation of Asian immigrants often did not have much English, and set up doing something they knew, which was cooking. Their sons and daughters have been brought up in the UK, and for them running a restaurant is not an aspirational career for many - they would rather be a doctor, lawyer or accountant. Many Indian restaurants struggle to keep the business within the family for this reason. Their overheads are steadily increasing, but they are reluctant to increase their prices as they feel that the market is already weak, and their customers may end up voting with their feet. What do you think? Leave a comment below, or Email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com.

The end video this week is a time lapse film showing the construction work that was carried out on the Crossrail development between Abbey Wood and Plumstead over the course of the Easter bank holiday weekend. It is certainly impressive. Give it a watch and see what you think.

Erith KFC 24/7?

On Thursday afternoon I was walking along Manor Road, past the KFC Drive Through (not "Thru" as it says on the sign - their branding team are imbeciles)  when I happened to see a notice in the window of the fast food outlet. I am always curious about such things, so I went down the steps to the entrance in order to more closely investigate. Quite a lot of the stories I publish come from carefully checking planning applications, either directly posted in the street, or submitted to Bexley Council's labyrinthine planning website. What I saw was a copy of a licencing application that the company that owns the KFC franchise has recently submitted to Bexley Council. What I saw horrified me. You can see a photograph of the application below. Apologies for the glare and reflections - the light was not the best.

In essence, the store wants to increase its opening hours to include the period between 11pm and 5am seven days a week. Apart from an hour or so closed in the evening, and another hour after 5am, presumably to allow cleaning, this would in effect mean that the drive through would be permanently open to customers. If they were to succeed in their application, there would be a constant stream of drunks, druggies, violent criminals and all sorts of anti social undesirables brought into what is a fundamentally residential area. You may think I am over - reacting, but if one looks at what has happened to the nearby existing 24/7 fast food drive through - the McDonald's at Plumstead, which is in a far more suitable location (opposite the Plumstead Bus Garage, next to the Post Office sorting office, and well away from any residential housing), they have had to employ around the clock security guards due to constant problems of alcohol and drug related violence, anti social behaviour and all sorts of other associated criminality. What makes the situation in Manor Road even worse is that the KFC is directly opposite a McDonald's Drive Through. If the KFC succeeds, the McDonald's will be forced to also open 24/7 in order to compete. The McDonald's backs directly onto the Compton Place housing estate - and I am sure that local residents will have a lot to say on the subject. The KFC itself is directly opposite the block of flats on what used to be the site of Erith Odeon (a grade II* listed Art Deco building that was illegally demolished by the developers of the current flats), and it backs onto what used to be Erith Trades and Social Club, which has just been demolished to make way for key worker apartments. There are also houses that form part of Compton Place opposite the front of the fast food outlet; basically it is hemmed in on three sides by residential accommodation. I have had a chat with my contact in the local Police - and they are not happy about the planning application. Apart from the concerns already mentioned, there is apparently a history of burglars parking vans in drive through restaurant car parks, before the occupants go off to burgle nearby houses. An unusual van parked in a street or cul de sac attracts attention, but a van parked in a drive through does not, thus enabling them to break into a number of houses, then bring their stolen booty back to the van before making another sortie, undisturbed. I am also led to understand that both the McDonald's and KFC car parks are used to conduct drug deals from time to time. If you have strong feelings about the matter, it is possible to log an online complaint by clicking on this link to the Bexley Council Licencing Complaints Website. Whatever your personal opinion of the large fast food chains like McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King, for example, one can at least say that if you are in an unfamiliar town and find yourself in need of sustenance, visiting one of the large fast food chains will mean that you will know what you will get, and the standard of cooking and food hygiene will be consistently high. The food itself may well be bland and uninspiring, but reliability is often the key. I was therefore extremely surprised that the Erith drive through branch of McDonald’s currently has a “Scores on the Doors” food hygiene rating of only two out of five stars. For an organisation that prides itself on cleanliness and good ingredient handling practices, this is a real blow. In their defence, McDonald’s have issued the following public statement:- “The management team had recently changed resulting in a breakdown in the supervision of the cleanliness system.  The areas highlighted in the inspection have now been rectified and the cleaning system has been re-implemented”. I am certain that things will have markedly improved now, several months after the last inspection, but it does beg the question, how could a multinational mega brand allow one of its stores get into a position that it can only rate a two out of five star rating? It is immaterial whether the store is company owned or a franchise – the standards expected are identical. The damage to the McDonald’s brand should such information become widely known is difficult to calculate, but it certainly would not be good. It is ironic that a two star rating in Erith is actually at the upper end of the high ratings – pretty much anywhere else has one or no stars, with the notable exception of the Mambocino coffee shop / cafe, and the T-Bone Cafe in Fraser Road, both of which score a very creditable four stars out of five. I will have to take a look to see if McDonald’s have their pitiful rating sticker on display. Something tells me that would be very unlikely.

This Wednesday marked a very important date that remarkably few people are aware of. It was the seventieth anniversary of the switching on of Colossus – the World’s first programmable digital computer. On the 5^th of February 1944, the MK1 Colossus attacked its first cipher challenge. Contrary to some erroneous accounts, Colossus was not used to break the German Enigma code – that work was done on a separate set of electromechanical analogue computers called Bombes. What Colossus did was crack the daily key settings of an even more fiendishly complicated code system called Lorenz, which was exclusively used by the Nazi High Command to communicate with each other. Colossus was designed and built by a team headed by an amazing electronic engineer called Tommy Flowers, who was born and raised the son of a bricklayer in Poplar, East London. Flowers was ferociously intelligent, and whilst an  apprentice electrician at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich, he undertook  evening classes at the University of London, where he was awarded a BSc in Electrical Engineering. He later became the head of the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, where prior to the war he was instrumental in the design of the first automatic telephone exchange. I have a personal connection with this piece of history; my late Great Uncle Horace worked in the Dollis Hill Research Station during the war. We know very little of his wartime experiences, but we do know that as well as being exempted from military service, he was also exempted from Home Guard or fire watching duties, which was extremely unusual at the time. He never said anything about what he had been doing, but it remains likely he was part of Tommy Flowers’ Colossus design and construction team, which was the most secret allied project of the war, classified even higher than the Manhattan Project to create the first nuclear weapons. Colossus was an amazing feat of engineering - It occupied the size of a living room (7 ft high by 17 ft wide and 11 ft deep), weighed five tonnes, and used 8kW of power. It incorporated 2,500 valves, 501 of which are thyraton switches, about 100 logic gates and 10,000 resistors connected by 7 km of wiring. Reading 5000 characters per second (faster than anything ever produced commercially), Colossus found the start wheel positions of Lorenz-encrypted messages to enable the decryption of 63 million characters. Typically, it took Colossus up to four hours to establish the start wheel positions of messages. It is often surmised that the Allies might have been reading some of the decrypted messages even before they reached Nazi High Command. By the end of the war, 63 million characters of high-grade German messages had been decrypted by the 550 people working on the ten functioning Colossi at Bletchley Park. After the war, some of the Colossi were destroyed, and the remaining ones moved to GCHQ, where it is said they were in operation until the mid 1970’s. By the early 1980’s the story of Bletchley Park and the Colossus computer was finally coming out, after over thirty years of total secrecy. Great Uncle Horace never said a word, and it is to my great regret that we only discovered after his death what may have been his involvement with the astonishing feat which has gone on to change the world. Up until very recently I would have recommended Bletchley Park as an ideal day out for anyone with an interest in history, computers, radio, or who just wants a day out somewhere with lovely formal gardens and a picturesque lake. Things have changed, however. It used to be that visitors could pay a one – off entrance fee, which would grant them access to all of the facilities in the grounds of Bletchley Park; there was a motor museum, a museum dedicated to Winston Churchill memorabilia, the National Radio Centre (run by the Radio Society of Great Britain, of which I am an inductee) an old fashioned post office and a model railway. On top of this, the two main attractions were the main Bletchley Park House and the surrounding huts, used by the wartime code breakers, and the National Museum of Computing, home to the rebuilt Colossus. Recently a new Chief Executive was appointed by Bletchley Park Trust (the charity which has overall responsibility for the place). The new chap, called Ian Standen has decided that he wants to turn the park into the “Disneyland of code breaking”. He’s closed down the Churchill Museum, and made every facility except the main house and the huts an extra entrance fee, and also fired a number of the volunteer curators for not being “on message” despite the fact that many of the volunteers worked at Bletchley Park, or later at GCHQ and have an intimate personal knowledge of the history of the place. Instead he wants to use actors to play "characters" loosely based on real life people to guide visitors around the museum. To add insult to injury, he has had the National Museum of Computing fenced off and excluded from guided tours, even though the huts they occupy were an integral part of the original organisational setup. Visitors now have to navigate a series of gates and pay an additional fee to enter the computing section, even if all they want to do is see the Tony Sale Colossus computer rebuild (as pictured above), which to be honest is the focal point for any visit to Bletchley Park. As you may appreciate, these changes, which are designed to create additional visitor revenue may well have done exactly the opposite. A campaign is now under way to get Ian Standen sacked, and the whole Bletchley Park setup returned to how it originally was established. The campaign are currently trying to recruit Stephen Fry as their figurehead, and from what I have read, they already have a huge amount of support, both from visitors and the IT industry. At present Bletchley Park is being torn apart by a small coterie of people who have no appreciation or understanding of the place, and merely want to turn a quick buck. The place is not an amusement park; it is a British technological and cultural institution that should be treated with suitable dignity. I suspect that the “re – organisation” will be cut short by those who really care about Bletchley Park. In the meantime I would urge readers to boycott the place in order to send a message to the likes of Ian Standen that he cannot play fast and loose with a national treasure, where the wartime code breakers shortened the war by an estimated two years, saved countless lives and in so doing created the computer revolution. You can see an online album of photos of Bletchley Park by clicking here.

The News Shopper are reporting that the Crossrail tunnel from just outside of Plumstead Station going Northwards under the River Thames to North Greenwich has now been completed. Around seventy percent of the Crossrail project has now been completed, and I understand not only that, but the work has been done on time and on budget. Although seventy percent of the tunnelling is completed, the full project is at the halfway point. There are many stations to be built, and infrastructure to be commissioned too. Crossrail are opening some of their building sites to the general public, who will be able to view the progress of work for themselves. You can visit their website here to book free tickets for a number of events.  The Crossrail project is a massive venture; it is costing £73 billion, and employing around 10,000 people, including 280 apprentices.

Following my musing on local bespoke tailors nowadays and in history, another skilled craft came to my attention recently. Whilst putting together each Maggot Sandwich weekly update, I sit in my dedicated home office in front of my iMac. I have a very comfortable orthopaedic chair which originally belonged to my late Dad. He gave it to me years before he got seriously ill; I must have had it for around fifteen years I guess. The chair was custom made for him by what used to be the orthopaedic department of the now long defunct New Cross Hospital when he had a hip replacement operation. Even though the chair was custom made for him, he never really took to it, and it remained only occasionally employed, until he gave it to me. I have used it daily ever since. Nowadays the chair is looking very shabby; the black vinyl seat covering is split, and the foam stuffing is visible; it would be very easy for me to go out and buy a new office chair for around £70 or so, but not only has my old chair got sentimental connections, apart from needing re – upholstering, the thing is in very good order. There are still a few professional furniture upholsterers around, and last Saturday morning I turned up at the door of Perry’s Upholsterers at Plumstead Corner. The shop has been there for as long as I can recall. The owner was very open and friendly, took a quick look at my chair, and immediately said that he would be happy to restore it, but there was a six month waiting list for his services! I was gobsmacked – I had (incorrectly) assumed that very few people would require the services of an upholsterer. I thought that most people would have rather gone out and purchased a new three – piece suite from DFS or Land of Leather, rather than having their existing one professionally rebuilt. How wrong I was. The proprietor informed me that he gets a lot of work, as there is still a demand for furniture refurbishment and recovering, there are really only two high class upholsterers in the borough, and demand for their services is very high. He went on to say that when he first started, as apprentice to his father some thirty odd years ago, there was a lot of competition and prices were low in order to win work; now the opposite is true – prices are high, competition low and waiting lists long. This seems to resonate with my story about the rarity of the bespoke tailor in UK society nowadays. Back in 1939, Burton’s had opened a bespoke tailors shop in Erith High Street, and you could get a custom made suit for 45 shillings (£2.50 equivalent).  Local Historian Ken Chamberlain has memories of the place being extremely impressive, and sent me the advert with the very dashing looking chap in the photo above - click on the image for a larger view. I notice that the sharp styling is heavily influenced by American fashions of the time – wide shoulders and a narrow waist – a look that featured in many period gangster movies which were very popular then. Regular Maggot Sandwich reader Lance has been doing some investigations into the comparative cost of pre – WW2 bespoke tailoring compared with now, and has come up with some interesting findings. Lance writes:-“ Did a couple of quick comparisons against 1938 cost of living.  Firstly multiples of a loaf of bread.  In 1938 that was 2p or 6 to the shilling, so 26 shillings gives us 156 loaves of bread or at today’s price of £1.50 it’s £234.00. Secondly fractions of the price of a house.  In 1938 the average house price was £600 and 26 shillings is 1.3 pounds so 600/1.3 is 462.  Today’s average house price is £240,000 divided by 462 is £519.00 . Gives us a range between £234 and £519, which would fit in with your hypothesis about bespoke tailoring being relatively more affordable”. Interesting stuff indeed, as a bespoke man’s suit from Sidcup based Mold and Russell with set you back something in the region of £950 today, depending on material and finish.

Regular readers may recall that back in August last year, I mourned the closure of my favourite restaurant, which had been serving authentic home – style curries in Brick Lane since 1969. Sweet and Spicy closed its doors for the final time due to a massive increase in both rent and business rates, levied by Tower Hamlets Council. Sweet and Spicy catered mainly to the Bangladeshi and Pakistani local residents, rather than the tourists that most of the other more mainstream establishments in Brick Lane attract. It would appear that Sweet and Spicy may have just been the first of many food outlets to close – as the rules created and enforced by the council have suddenly been changed. The Evening Standard are reporting that many of the curry houses in Brick Lane have licences that allow them to serve food and drink until one or two AM on weekdays. The council have a bye law that says that no “sit down” restaurant  in Tower Hamlets can admit customers after eleven PM, and that all restaurants must be closed by midnight, or the owners would be faced by a fine of £20,000. They say that this ruling overrides the terms of the food and drink licensing, though I understand that this has yet to be legally challenged. Understandably many local restaurant owners are up in arms over this issue – they regard it as a restraint of trade, as the Brick Lane Restaurant Association say that on average, restaurants get around a third of their total income from sales made after midnight, and a curfew would mean that many of the sixty restaurants in Brick Lane would be forced to close for good. Tower Hamlets Council say that the midnight curfew is to stop “anti social behaviour”. I suspect an ulterior motive on the part of the council – when I first started visiting Brick Lane in the mid nineties, it was still home to the rag trade, with many small “sweat shop” factories, and trade outlet shops selling cheap clothing to vendors such as market traders. There were quite a few restaurants, but overall it was a grimy and not very welcoming place if you were not a local. Very slowly, over the intervening years, the Lane has slowly got smarter, and has become a tourist attraction dedicated almost exclusively to Indian restaurants. The area in and around Brick Lane was rebranded as “Bangla Town”, and a campaign to re-name Whitechapel tube station to Brick Lane Tube station started. Whilst this was all happening, the former Truman brewery in the lane was converted into a retail space with offices for a number of start up technology companies, and the surrounding roads, still with original crumbling Huguenot terraced houses became fashionable – one by one they were bought up and restored, and they are now some of the most desirable properties in central London. In short, the area has become gentrified. I suspect that Tower Hamlets Council are enforcing the midnight customer curfew as they actually want to drastically reduce the number of curry houses in the road; after all, the amount of Council and Business Tax that can be generated from a small but busy restaurant is limited. By killing the restaurants off, the council would be able to get property developers to move in, and thus attract wealthy foreign investors. London is already the hottest property location in the World – millionaires from places like Russia and China are attracted to the UK, and specifically London for a number of reasons: The UK is politically stable, has a very well respected legal system, and property is a very good investment, especially when foreigners may lack confidence in their own countries. As we have seen in the news not that long ago, some Russian oligarchs have been both  imprisoned and had their assets seized because they fell foul  of President Putin. Much money is flooding into the UK from foreign sources, as it is regarded as a safe haven.  I reckon that Tower Hamlets Council have realised that with some cunning dealing, they can secure a slice of this potentially lucrative cake. Please feel to leave a comment below, or email me at hugh.neal@gmail.com

The ending video is somewhat appropriate; it is a short explanatory film about Bletchley Park and the code breaking work carried out by the Colossi during World War 2. There are interviews with a number of the original operators and engineers. If my Great Uncle Horace had still been alive, it is possible that he would have featured in the documentary. Do give it a watch and please feel free to leave a comment below.